سینمای نوین

What it means

سینمای نوین (cinema-ye novin), the Iranian New Wave, is the name for the art-cinema movement that emerged in Iran in the late 1960s and reshaped both the domestic industry and Iran’s image in world cinema. سینما is the French loan; نوین (novin) is the Persian word for “new” in its more formal, literary register, paired here with the ezafe to read “the new cinema.” The movement is the reason a country with a population the size of Germany has produced a cinema whose names sit comfortably alongside the major auteur traditions of the world.

The conventional starting point is داریوش مهرجویی (Daryush Mehrjui) and his film گاو (Gaav, The Cow, 1969), adapted from a story by the writer غلامحسین ساعدی (Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi). Earlier precursors include the documentary work of Ebrahim Golestan in the 1960s and the short film خانه سیاه است (The House Is Black, 1962) by the poet Forough Farrokhzad.

How to use it

The term lives in film criticism, in academic writing, in retrospectives and museum programs. It is the standard label both inside Iran and abroad.

cinema-ye novin chehre-ye iran ra dar sinema-ye jahan sākht.

The New Wave built Iran’s face in world cinema.

سینمای نوین چهره ایران را در سینمای جهان ساخت.

kiarostami az borjaste-tarin nemayande-haye cinema-ye novin bud.

Kiarostami was one of the most prominent figures of the New Wave.

کیارستمی از برجسته‌ترین نمایندگان سینمای نوین بود.

The founding figures

Beyond Mehrjui, the central names include بهرام بیضایی (Bahram Beyzaie), the playwright-filmmaker whose films draw on Persian theatrical traditions; سهراب شهید ثالث (Sohrab Shahid Saless), whose patient observational style anticipated much later Iranian cinema; مسعود کیمیایی (Mas’ud Kimiyai), associated with the urban realist strain; and عباس کیارستمی (Abbas Kiarostami), whose work in the 1980s and 1990s carried the movement’s aesthetic to its widest international audience and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997 for طعم گیلاس (Ta’m-e Gilas, Taste of Cherry). The next generation, the so-called second wave from the 1990s onward, includes Jafar Panahi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Samira Makhmalbaf, and Asghar Farhadi.

Why Iran punches above its weight

The international stature of cinema-ye novin is the more striking because the movement matured under heavy constraint. The state censorship apparatus, the limits on what can be shown of women, of dissent, of intimacy, of religion: these are the working conditions of every Iranian filmmaker since 1979. The New Wave’s aesthetic, the long take, the non-professional cast, the rural setting, the child protagonist, the documentary-realist surface that holds a deeper allegorical layer, is partly an artistic choice and partly a strategy for working around constraint. Allegory, ellipsis, and what the camera does not show became the movement’s strengths. Iranian filmmakers learned to say complex things with simple materials. That craft, more than any single film, is what cinema-ye novin gave to world cinema.

Where it comes from

The term itself is a calque on the French nouvelle vague, the New Wave of late-1950s French cinema (Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer), which Iranian critics consciously took as a reference point. سینما is the French loan; نوین is a Persian word, the literary register of “new,” chosen over the everyday جدید (jadid, new, Arabic loan) to give the label a more elevated tone. The result is a term that points at French film history while staying linguistically Iranian.

References

• Dehkhoda, نوین
• Vajehyab, سینمای نوین